New UPN comedy captures 'Beat' quirks

NEW YORK {AP} It's funny how when you're a cop, your work slops over into your off hours and back again.

For instance, you're Officer Zane Marinelli and your crazy girlfriend comes calling for you at the precinct house, barging right into the men's shower to, um, pay you her respects.

Or you're Officer Mike Dorigan and you drop by the hospital to patch things up with your fiancee, a medical student, then catch sight of someone being brought in: Hey, isn't that the guy with the Harley who escaped unhurt from a crackup you handled just yesterday?

Ahhh, life on the beat as captured by "The Beat," a new police drama from Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, creators of "Homicide: Life on the Street" and "Oz." It airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on KUPT Channel 22 (Cox Cable Channel 15).

But this series doesn't just focus on day-to-day policing by Marinelli and Dorigan in the 12th Precinct of Manhattan's scruffy Lower East Side. "The Beat" also represents an EKG of each young man's private ups and downs.

Mark Ruffalo plays Zane, an Italian-American whose taste for twisted dames maybe stems from a childhood trauma: His father killed his mother.

"His nature is to be happy-go-lucky," says Ruffalo, "but his experience in life is dark and damaging. There's constant internal conflict. For me, that's fun. It's playable stuff."

At 32, Ruffalo is an about-to-be-star who grew up in Virginia Beach, Va., and San Diego, studied acting in Los Angeles, then won praise on the New York stage with "This Is Our Youth" in 1996.

His film "You Can Count on Me," in which he costars with Laura Linney ("The Truman Show"), shared top honors at this year's Sundance Film Festival. And after "The Beat" wrapped its first 13 episodes, he jumped into a new off-Broadway play, "The Moment When."

Ruffalo's "Beat" costar, Derek Cecil, who has joined him to chat with a reporter about the series, hasn't had quite such a hectic time. A New York transplant from Amarillo, Texas, the 27-year-old Cecil was, in his own words, "living pretty thin" by last summer. "I was wearing the same shirt to every audition." He laughs a big laugh.

The role he so joyfully landed is that of Mike, the mildly melancholy counterpoint to free-spirited Zane. Mike, an Irish-American who has been on the force six months less than his partner's scant 3 years, prefers to follow the rules and play things cautious. (One exception: He likes sushi.)

Mike is engaged to lovely doctor-in-training Elizabeth (played by Poppy Montgomery), with whom he is having premarital spats. Zane, on the other hand, has his hands full with psycho-squeeze Beatrice (a bravura performance by Heather Burns, who played Meg Ryan's bookstore assistant in the film "You've Got Mail").

Could anybody be so rash as to ask Beatrice to share an apartment? Zane is; Zane did. But the lurking charm of "The Beat," both on and off the beat, is the naivete of its two heroes even when seasoned judgment is desperately needed.

"As a cop, you have to take a position of authority even if you don't know what the hell is going on," says Ruffalo. "Sometimes, you just have to fake it." This is the life that unites Zane and Mike.

Meanwhile, the visual style of "The Beat" suggests that life around them is flying apart. The series is shot with palm-size, handheld cameras on what seems to be random scraps of film and tape: Without warning, the full-color filmic look will give way to grainy, monochromatic video, busting through with immediacy as if the show had been jammed by an episode of "Cops."

On a series where the director of photography sometimes wears Rollerblades, the actors also enjoy freedom of movement, says Ruffalo, noting, "You don't have to hit any marks." You just have to make sure you don't bounce your nose off the lens: "Sometimes those cameras are literally 3 inches from your face."

The series is shot on the streets of Manhattan, with Mike (that is, Derek Cecil) at the wheel of the patrol car.

"I hit one guy in the head," Cecil confesses with a sly grin. "He was a stunt guy and I was supposed to get really close to him fairly quickly. The side mirror gave him a minor concussion."

Ruffalo rolls his eyes the way a partner does.

But "The Beat" faces peril even greater than Cecil's driving: The shifting sands of UPN, a willfully lowbrow network whose signature drama is currently "WWF Smackdown!"

Does UPN know what to do with this sassy, inventive cop show? Will the audience that frequents UPN know what to make of "The Beat"?